Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning into loser kid pinball podcast.
Speaker: This is episode one 20.
Speaker: I do not have Scott with me today because this is kind of a random episode and I'll explain it here in a second.
Speaker: But before we get into that, I want to thank our sponsors flipping out pinball Zach and Nicole many.
Speaker: They are awesome.
Speaker: If you're looking for great quality customer service, I highly recommend them and their team.
Speaker: They've done leaps and bounds for me and Scott.
Speaker: Uh, labyrinth was just released.
Speaker: Zach is one of those dealers.
Speaker: So if you want to get barrels of funds, new game labyrinth that stole pinball expos 2023 and raised expectations or Elton John from JJP, which is a beautiful game with it in its own right.
Speaker: We'll be talking about those games next episode.
Speaker: We'll be recording Thursday, but I wanted to hurry and get this episode out.
Speaker: Um, because this episode has been two and a half years in the making.
Speaker: Let me explain.
Speaker: I reached out to a couple of friends in the pinball industry.
Speaker: two and a half years ago about a man that I kept seeing on Williams games and who was kind of a permanent fixture in the tilt, the battle of state pinball documentary.
Speaker: Larry DeMar has done some amazing things and I just don't feel like he gets enough credit.
Speaker: Uh, I've been messaging this man and ever since he left pinball, he started up his own companies.
Speaker: He's worked with other partners.
Speaker: This man is constantly working as you'll hear in this interview.
Speaker: He does roughly
Speaker: 70, 80 hours of work a week, easily, not including other responsibilities that he has to do.
Speaker: So it was hard to find some time to track this man down.
Speaker: But you know what?
Speaker: I messaged him that I was going to be in Chicago.
Speaker: I knew that's where he lived.
Speaker: I said, hey, I'm going to be at Pinball Expo this year.
Speaker: I don't know if you'll be there, but it'd be nice to sit down and get that interview with you.
Speaker: And he said, you know what?
Speaker: Aim for Thursday and let's do it.
Speaker: So on Monday this past week, the week before Expo started, messages say, hey, we're still good to go for this Thursday.
Speaker: And he said, I'm really sorry, Josh, but my wife has tested positive for COVID.
Speaker: I won't be able to make it.
Speaker: And so I told him that's okay.
Speaker: We'll figure out another time.
Speaker: And I thought that'd be the end of that.
Speaker: But as Expo showed up, I got a message from Larry saying that he would be making it Saturday and that his wife was no longer –
Speaker: had COVID and he, he tested negative for five plus days.
Speaker: And so I said, well, let's go ahead and do that interview.
Speaker: I was actually in the middle of pinball Olympics.
Speaker: So I dropped everything, told Scott Denise seen banger Jay, sorry, I got to get out of here.
Speaker: And I zipped it right back to pinball expo.
Speaker: Thanks to Joel Engelberth and his brother, Jared.
Speaker: And so I got back, I sat down with this man.
Speaker: You're going to hear in this interview, a lot of the games he's already, uh, that he has worked on.
Speaker: I mean, there's too much of a coincidence for me that he's worked on some of the best games that have ever been revered.
Speaker: I'm going to spill him right now.
Speaker: I know I'm going to spill him again here in a second.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: You've got Black Knight.
Speaker: You've got Adam's Family.
Speaker: You've got Twilight Zone, Fun House, Bonsai Run.
Speaker: He was one of the ones that kind of helped with Space Shuttle.
Speaker: You're going to hear all this.
Speaker: It's amazing that this man has, I felt like, helped kept pinball alive during the 80s and 90s and was a pivotal instrument in helping pinball evolve over the years.
Speaker: He has been named the godfather of modern code by Josh Sharp, and I think it is very clear and evident when you hear it.
Speaker: Like I said, the reason this is a special episode, I had none of my recording equipment with me.
Speaker: So your YouTube video is not going to be there for Larry, but I do.
Speaker: I'm still doing an intro video, obviously, for YouTube.
Speaker: I appreciate those that are doing this, watching it here.
Speaker: And so without further ado, Larry DeMar.
Speaker: I am super giddy because the man that I'm sitting with today is an absolute legend.
Speaker: Josh Sharp has named him the godfather of modern code.
Speaker: If you're looking for a commonality between Twilight Zone, Adam's Family, Fun House, Black Knight, High Speed, World Cup Soccer 94, this man is the man.
Speaker: I've got Larry DeMar with me.
Speaker: How you doing, Larry?
Speaker: I'm doing great.
Speaker: Well, that list of games from memory is pretty good.
Speaker: They are memorable games.
Speaker: They're just, they're fantastic.
Speaker: I mean, all these games have such an impact on pinball history.
Speaker: And it's amazing that you had your hand in all this.
Speaker: I just, what made, what brought you to Williams back in the 80s?
Speaker: My story starts much further back.
Speaker: I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois.
Speaker: And my parents were good friends with Alvin Gottlieb and his family.
Speaker: And so I started playing pinball machines in his basement and in my best friend's basement.
Speaker: My best friend had a Cinderella.
Speaker: And in Alvin's basement, we played a game with a very target.
Speaker: I can't remember.
Speaker: I can't remember the, the, the, I don't know.
Speaker: It was a, it was a roto spinner, not a very target.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And, and I just loved every excuse.
Speaker: Pinball was illegal in Chicago.
Speaker: And so we were playing pitch and bat games and bowlers and things like that.
Speaker: But, but getting to play pinball machines was, was unusual and a treat at the time.
Speaker: And I took that right, you know, my whole life looking for pinballs where I could find them.
Speaker: And then when I went to college, I spent a lot of time in the game room or playing the pinballs that were right in the basement of my dorm.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: going back to 1970, probably 1978, I was a junior or a senior in college and Bally's eight ball came out.
Speaker: Um, and it was one of the first electronic games, you know, we first had a Knight Rider.
Speaker: Um, but when eight ball came out, we, we played it a lot.
Speaker: I was a pretty good pinball player.
Speaker: And at,
Speaker: In that particular game, you collect the balls around the play field and build up the rack of balls.
Speaker: And when you fill up the rack of balls, it lights the super bonus light, which represents all the points for a rack.
Speaker: And then you start lighting a second rack.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: when you fill up that second rack, the software clears it.
Speaker: And so your bonus actually goes down on that ball or the next ball, because instead of getting, you know, one rack and 14 balls, one rack and 13 balls, you get one rack and zero balls where you're trying to refill the rack that it stole from you.
Speaker: And I was pitching about this, um, you know, late one night when we were playing, um, maybe a little alcohol induced, um,
Speaker: And somebody said to me, could you do any better?
Speaker: And I was studying computer science at the time.
Speaker: And the next day I sent letters to Williams, Bailey and Gottlieb, all of which I had toured in Chicago, maybe a year or two earlier.
Speaker: Um, and long story short, Gottlieb and Bailey never returned my, my letter.
Speaker: We reached Alvin Gottlieb later and it never reached him.
Speaker: Somebody screened it for him, even though it was personally addressed to Alvin Gottlieb.
Speaker: And from Williams, David Poole called me back, called me in for an interview.
Speaker: And my hometown was Chicago.
Speaker: So it was interesting to come back from Boston to Chicago.
Speaker: But at the same time, I interviewed at Bell Labs, which is kind of like the Google of the time.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: If you were in tech right now, if you're in tech, you know, and you're getting your degree, it would be really cool to go work at a place like Google or Facebook or, you know, any of the really super tech giants.
Speaker: And Bell Labs was the Google of the time.
Speaker: And so Bell Labs, where I had interviewed also in Chicago, had made me an offer.
Speaker: that had me working two days a week, going to school for my master's three days a week, paying me for five days of work and tuition.
Speaker: And Williams offered me a little less money and wanted me to come and work for five days.
Speaker: So I took the job at Bell in, that would be September of 79.
Speaker: And four months into it, I was,
Speaker: I actually not for a month.
Speaker: And right around the time I took the job in Williams, it offered me the job.
Speaker: Ken Fidesz at Williams.
Speaker: And Ken is a legend, really the point person of all the greatness that happened at Williams, along with Mike Stroll, who really had the philosophy of we're going to find really great people.
Speaker: We're going to empower them to do what they do.
Speaker: We're going to hold our nose and ears a lot from the process and kind of keep our hands off.
Speaker: And that was Mike Stroll.
Speaker: He was the president at the time and really set the stage for all the greatness of Williams-Balley Midway for the 80s and 90s.
Speaker: And Ken Fidesna was the point person who ran the preschool.
Speaker: which was all of the people that I worked with making games.
Speaker: And he snuck me into the AMOA show in the fall of 79, right when I took the job at Bell.
Speaker: And I just couldn't get the game thing out of my head.
Speaker: And a few months after working at Bell, I called Ken back, said, do you still have a position open?
Speaker: And literally in January of 1980, they were just starting to put together the defender team to make Williams first video game.
Speaker: And so, um, I joined, I started, I was, I, I joined Williams and literally upon arriving at Williams, I meet Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jervis.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And they would become my mentors.
Speaker: And you just can't believe how lucky I was that, that I was shown the ropes and, and under the wing of these two brilliant genius game designers.
Speaker: Um, and I walked into Williams, um, in the middle of a bit of a revolution, um, Mike and Ken and Dave pool,
Speaker: Paul DeSalt was there.
Speaker: Chuck Blake.
Speaker: They were all creating the new Salad State Pinball, which they kind of did in a skunk works off site and then came in and started taking over the operation.
Speaker: And they had to work with a lot of guys, Steve Kordak at the top, who had been in the industry for 50 years and a team of people that
Speaker: made games with relays, designing very high-tech electromechanical systems to make these games work.
Speaker: And Steve and Eugene were trying to really move the envelope really quickly, which in that time frame had culminated in firepower, which went from kind of a, you know...
Speaker: more of a static experience to more of a, a here's what we're doing over, over a progression and then adding the excitement of multi ball, which hadn't been seen.
Speaker: And, and really the first time of really jazzing up the, the sound and speech, um, in a, in a very quantum leap over Phoenix and flash, which were the stepping stones.
Speaker: into let's use technology to be a little, a little crazy and, and more exciting.
Speaker: And, and just to kind of paint the scene of this, um, this rivalry between the old guard and the new guard, when they first added sounds to the games, the pinball machines before solid state were all chimes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And all the early solid state games were done with chime units.
Speaker: And they made chimes like pinballs, Knight Rider, and Evel Knievel, and on the Williams side, Grand Prix and Hot Tip.
Speaker: All those early games had chime units.
Speaker: And I think Phoenix might have been the first game with a sound system.
Speaker: And when it was designed, everybody internally had a big war over, no, we can't take the chimes out, or no one will play it, it's not pinball.
Speaker: And they ended up not only putting the chime unit in to the early games that had sound, they actually sent all communication to the soundboard through the solenoids that rang the chimes.
Speaker: so that the system could always throw a switch and use chimes because everyone was going to hate the new sounds.
Speaker: And in the early games, they also put a score motor that just turned around when something would happen just to let you feel the vibration of the old motor that was in the old games.
Speaker: So not only did Steve and Eugene become my mentor, but
Speaker: Um, they were looking at a, at a, at a strong recruit for their side of this new revolution that was taking place in pinball.
Speaker: Is that kind of where high speed starts to come in?
Speaker: Because that seems to be really where the table started to turn with all that.
Speaker: You know, there were some really momentous building block steps.
Speaker: Like I said, I really, um, put Phoenix is the first step, then maybe flash.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: then Gorgar, then firepower, and high speed would be the next quantum step in that ladder of great capability being added onto what preceded it.
Speaker: And actually, I probably missed Black Knight in that sequence.
Speaker: Between, I guess Black Knight was after firepower.
Speaker: That was the first
Speaker: first of two games I worked on with Steve.
Speaker: And when I got to Williams, I was working as an employee at Williams for one year.
Speaker: In that one year, I did more things and more work and more progress and more to show for it than any year I've worked in my career.
Speaker: I'm always working like a dog, okay?
Speaker: I work until it's time to go to better...
Speaker: or time for some obligation.
Speaker: But, um, in that one year, um, I programmed Scorpion was my, actually my first game was Las Vegas with Roger Sharp and Steve Epstein.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That would have been a great, okay.
Speaker: And I, and I entered the business, um, as a, as a new programmer in pinball and Roger Sharp, I had his book.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I, you know, the, the movie of the man who saved Pinball, I had his book and had read all about this journey and, you know, I was starstruck to have, you know, Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis, you know, okay.
Speaker: They're, they're, they're, they're this gruff guy that, that, you know, designs games and, and Eugene, I thought was really kind of a nerdy guy and, and had no understanding.
Speaker: of what an amazing, amazing creator and inventor he was.
Speaker: But all of a sudden, hearing you're gonna meet Roger Sharp and he and Steve have drawn a game on a napkin.
Speaker: Barry Osler drew it out and they wanted me to be the programmer of this game.
Speaker: And so Roger and Steve were both in New York City at the time.
Speaker: And they visit Chicago on a weekend and the place is closed.
Speaker: And I come in on the weekend and spend time going over the game and talking about rules and the like.
Speaker: And then for lunch, we went out to Chicago Game Company, which was a local arcade on Western Avenue, where we often tested games and we played some pinball there.
Speaker: And I was a really good pinball player in the time, and I'm still a pretty good pinball player today.
Speaker: And I, of course, wanted to impress Roger, and I couldn't hit anything but a rubber post on any ball of any game that I played with him that day.
Speaker: I remember specifically we were playing Big Game and Cheetah, two games.
Speaker: games from Stern at the time that were the medium-sized wide bodies.
Speaker: And they were putting the games through their paces, and I literally could not hit a shot in five or six games that we played.
Speaker: And so Roger along the way not only came to know my pinball playing abilities, but he and I played as a doubles team in the early IFPA tournaments and did really, really well.
Speaker: So that was it.
Speaker: So Las Vegas was developed a little bit and was put on the shelf.
Speaker: It was resurrected as Jet Orbit.
Speaker: And the names were based on three bank of drop targets on the left, five bank of drop targets on the right, Las Vegas, Jet Orbit.
Speaker: And finally was produced as Barakora, which put two R's on the third target to make the nine letters go on the eight targets, which always struck me as crazy because they just could have spelled Barakora with one R. Yes.
Speaker: And it eventually came out several years after I first started on that game.
Speaker: And then I did Scorpion, which was the second multi-ball game after Firepower on a wide body with a mediocre playfield layout.
Speaker: And I got to tinker with some multitasking ideas and
Speaker: that Eugene didn't do in Firepower that I thought we could, we were always talking about multitasking where different processes could do different things.
Speaker: And so I played with some of that on Scorpion.
Speaker: And after having done a full game, it was time to revamp the whole Williams operating system.
Speaker: It had been done a couple of years earlier and pinball was evolving and it really needed more capabilities.
Speaker: And it was a project that I talked about with Ken and Steve, but I didn't know at the time, but the management wasn't sure they should trust the guy that just got out of school and had no experience to try and develop a new system, which at the time you had to design it, develop it.
Speaker: and burn it into ROMs in mass quantities, and it couldn't change from game to game.
Speaker: Things couldn't be added and bugs couldn't be fixed because EPROMs were too expensive at the time.
Speaker: And so after doing the first game successfully, which also let me learn every nook and cranny of the old system, they let me do the new system.
Speaker: And so all at once,
Speaker: And Steve tagged me as programmer for Black Knight.
Speaker: And I was helping Eugene get the whole video game thing started.
Speaker: So all at once, I was working in two buildings on the new operating system, on the Black Knight pinball machine, and on early work on the software that would be the base system for Defenders.
Speaker: And, um, Steve is a perfectionist and generally take several iterations of white woods to develop a game.
Speaker: And so his time between his white wood passes on his game gave me a lot of time to work on the new pinball system and on the defender stuff.
Speaker: And so in the first year I did Whitewoods of Las Vegas, Scorpion, the new Pinball operating system, Black Knight, Jungle Lord, some base work on Defender's operating system, some in-between work to develop for enemy development on Defender,
Speaker: and the crunch work before the show to put it in a track mode high score table and lead the technical team to get chips burnt so we could put them in the games at the show at AMOA.
Speaker: No wonder you work 70, 80 hours.
Speaker: You've been doing it since you got out of the gate.
Speaker: So that was it.
Speaker: And following the success we had with Defender,
Speaker: Williams opened up a bigger engineering facility on Kedzie Avenue, about a mile and a half from the California facility that was the pinball factory where we all worked, and moved all the video game development there.
Speaker: And they hired a bunch of programmers.
Speaker: They built out a bunch of little tiny offices, and they had a terrible HVAC system,
Speaker: that caused us to all have to keep our doors open.
Speaker: And some of us, and I was the worst violator, blasting a radio while I worked because this was before AirPods and great use of headphones were a thing.
Speaker: And between the HVAC and the noise, Eugene and I, who had talked about leaving to start our own company,
Speaker: Okay, just one day it had enough working at this new building that we said, let's give it a try.
Speaker: And so we walked into Mike Stroll, who was the president of the company.
Speaker: And said to him, we're leaving.
Speaker: What do you mean you're leaving?
Speaker: We're going to go off and try and make games on our own.
Speaker: Part of it, actually, most of it was just that the game designers were not recognized as valuable talent.
Speaker: And even though Mike had, you know, paid more than other companies, we were
Speaker: the make it or break it factor for, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars of business.
Speaker: And we're not being compensated as entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And so we decided we would go out on our own, make games and then license them to companies that would buy them from us.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And Mike said, Mike tried to talk us out of it.
Speaker: There were some financial offers at the time, and we had kind of decided, we kind of decided this is what we were going to do.
Speaker: And Mike was, before you do anything, I want you to come to New York with me, and let's talk about this some more.
Speaker: And he flew Eugene and I first class to New York,
Speaker: And we met with Luna Castro, who was the chairman of the company at the time and controlled the company.
Speaker: And he and Mike, at the end of the day, said, if you're going to do this on your own, I want you doing it for me.
Speaker: And so we made a deal to go on our own and have Williams support us with some of the tech.
Speaker: They gave us an advance against royalties on our games and made a royalty deal that we liked the one we would have made with any company.
Speaker: And they said they wanted another game in six months.
Speaker: And that was key because a production line had been ramped up for defenders and they needed to keep the people in the factory working and fluent at making games.
Speaker: And
Speaker: my response was the only game you can have in six months is super defender.
Speaker: And so that is how stargate was born.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: And so they lent us one, the development systems were 30, $40,000 computers called exercisers made by Motorola.
Speaker: And these, they, they let us use, even though there were two of us programming the game, they let us use one.
Speaker: We had a deadline of six months.
Speaker: to have the game done.
Speaker: And so Eugene and I worked around the clock in the spare bedroom of my apartment and we created Stargate in six months, after which we got our own facility, came up with a cheaper, better technology for doing the development and did Robotron and Blaster as vid kits.
Speaker: And so that, that was, that was the early days and video, the, we, we, after getting my big start in pinball, which is my bigger passion, um, video really took over.
Speaker: Um, and then in 83, um, in 83, the, I, which crashed first, the home games or the, or the, uh,
Speaker: I want to say home games, Dad.
Speaker: Okay, there was a home game crash.
Speaker: In one order, one year after the other, the home games crashed and the video games crashed.
Speaker: And I was looking for my next gig at the time.
Speaker: Eugene left vid kids, left Chicago, moved back to California, got his master's at Stanford.
Speaker: And I was pittering around with some ideas to try to do on my own a home version of Wheel of Fortune for the computers that were out there.
Speaker: And Joe Kamenco was at Williams trying to get his way into engineering.
Speaker: He was with the sales department and the engineering group didn't really want him working with them.
Speaker: And he conned me into coming back with him
Speaker: in trying to make a pinball machine with them.
Speaker: And it's really a kind of a landmark point because Joe went to NASA and got the license for space shuttle.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And he can, he talked to Barry and got Barry to pull out a bunch of play fields.
Speaker: And Joe and I went in and we looked at a bunch of his old games, Barry Osler, such a nice guy.
Speaker: And he was so prolific.
Speaker: Okay, the bigger, you know, celebrity designers in the business, you know, did a game a year when they were good and sometimes a game every two years when it was taking longer, either because it was such a spectacular set of things they were doing or just because things were going slowly for different reasons or writer's block.
Speaker: Okay, I've seen writer's block where they're working on something and it's just not looking like they want it to be in there.
Speaker: One thing about the best designers, developers, producers, programmers, okay, they are almost all perfectionists, but every one of them is insecure.
Speaker: And so there is a fear at all times that there's not enough.
Speaker: It's not good enough.
Speaker: It's not going to be.
Speaker: you know, just loved and revered, it's only going to be good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so that causes, that causes, that can cause great delay of, of time when, when these people, you know, aren't sure and don't feel it when they're doing it.
Speaker: The super mega designers that we all know and love are,
Speaker: would have a rate of putting out games of one a year or maybe one every two years if things didn't go well.
Speaker: And this is due to this perfectionism married with insecurity.
Speaker: And Barry was a prolific play field production machine.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: He, he, he could draw a new complete play field every week.
Speaker: And some of them, you know, some of them were magnificent, you know, just the most amazing games ever.
Speaker: And some of them were less magnificent and, um,
Speaker: In this process, he had a pile of drawings that were just things that he drew that never, that nothing ever happened.
Speaker: Nothing was ever done with them.
Speaker: And Joe and I met with Barry and he started pulling out all his old play fields and he kind of, you know, and Joe was, was kind of being the point person and Joe had no experience making pinball machines.
Speaker: He had done some video game design for Williams out of his studio in Atlanta before joining the company.
Speaker: And he kind of, you know, was looking at things and we'll take this out of this game and the top of this one and the bottom of that one, and we'll put it together and we'll make a space shuttle game.
Speaker: And he sold it to the powers that be, and I agreed to come in four days a week to program it.
Speaker: And so that's what got me...
Speaker: from doing video games, you know, back into the pinball circuit.
Speaker: Um, and I did, um, work on that game and, and it, uh, pinball was, was, was really in the gutter in 82, 83.
Speaker: And this was in 1984.
Speaker: And the company was only a pinball company at this time.
Speaker: They, they were at, you know, they were done with video games, video games,
Speaker: Maybe not.
Speaker: Maybe they were working on Star Rider.
Speaker: Star Rider was their Laserdisc game.
Speaker: Laserdisc kind of finished off video games where video games were waning.
Speaker: Laserdisc was a shiny thing.
Speaker: Dragon's Lair was a monster hit.
Speaker: And other games had some success to a lesser extent.
Speaker: and Williams put all of their video resources in the star rider, they had kept pinball on the back burner with a small team making a very small number of games, but they kept all the know-how and all of the, the muscle memory of making them and producing them alive, you know, in 82 and 83.
Speaker: But,
Speaker: It was, it was, it was not a business and, and they weren't going to make money in video games and, um, firepower to done by Mark Ritchie just before this period had shown some spark of more interest in more game sales.
Speaker: And by the time we were heading to the show in 84 with space shuttle,
Speaker: We didn't know it, but Luna Castro had put down an ultimatum.
Speaker: You need to get 5,000 orders for the game or we're shutting the whole company down.
Speaker: And so this game went to the show.
Speaker: I think they got 7,000 orders.
Speaker: The game was a hit.
Speaker: And then it was followed very quickly by Comet, a brilliant Barry Osler, Python, Bill Futsenreiter game.
Speaker: And then I came and worked with Steve on high speed, and that followed Comet.
Speaker: So that really was sort of an exponential or hockey stick type of curve from going out of business to pinball is really something again.
Speaker: Well, and I've kind of followed some of the stuff you've done in the past too, and it seemed like high speed was kind of the catalyst for more people getting into pinball.
Speaker: I know a lot of people, if I remember correctly, that's kind of how Pat Lawler came along too, is he played high speed a lot and loved it.
Speaker: And I know that even like Keith Owen nowadays, that's one of his games he attributes, like high speed just captures you and captures the imagination, but it also was just such a fast and furious game.
Speaker: It kind of turned pinball on its head at that point.
Speaker: And so I guess the question I'm asking is, did you see that coming with high speed?
Speaker: Because like you said, pinball was dying and all of a sudden it just was an uptick.
Speaker: So how did you guys use that momentum to your advantage?
Speaker: It's the combination of a lot of things.
Speaker: It's really interesting you mentioned Keith Elwin because you and I just met on the expo floor at Keith Elwin's masterpiece, Godzilla.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so my hats off to him for creating that game.
Speaker: What a wonderful, wonderful game.
Speaker: It was the convergence of a whole bunch of things at once that was also benefited from the amount of time Steve spent perfecting that game.
Speaker: That game we probably worked on
Speaker: a year and a half, maybe longer.
Speaker: And we were adding on to the things that we had done in the previous several games, starting with Black Knights.
Speaker: The new operating system in Black Knight supported multi-threaded programming.
Speaker: So the biggest thing we could gain out of that was all kinds of use of time.
Speaker: And we had mystery shot timers.
Speaker: We had time drop targets.
Speaker: We had a timed bonus round at the end of the game.
Speaker: And when it came time for high speed,
Speaker: We first, over a giant, giant internal fight, okay, ended up getting the alpha-numeric displays on the game.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Okay, that was the first Williams pinball that had the alpha-numeric displays.
Speaker: Gottlieb actually beat us with those on a couple of games earlier.
Speaker: Gottlieb, while we were working on high speed, developed a game called rock.
Speaker: And rock had rock and roll instead of a synthesized space age sound going in the background.
Speaker: They actually were playing music.
Speaker: And the master of the music was Dave Thiel, who I revere.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I ran into him somewhere while we were working at high speed, and he explained how they did it without having the processing power and memory that was needed to really do music and pinballs.
Speaker: And he said, you know, they sampled one note.
Speaker: a C and then they played the C back at different speeds to make it other notes.
Speaker: So they, so they just had, you know, we're not talking megabytes, we're talking kilobytes.
Speaker: We're talking about, you know, a 2k or a 4k sample, which filled an EEPROM or two.
Speaker: And we only had two or three EEPROMs in the game.
Speaker: They sampled one note and they use software to make it play music.
Speaker: And I come back into Williams and I talked to Bill Perraud,
Speaker: who worked with Eugene Jarvis on the sound for high speed and talked to Steve about it.
Speaker: And we decided we're going to do that too.
Speaker: And the note that got sampled was Steve bringing in his guitar.
Speaker: Steve Rich is a great guitar player.
Speaker: And he composed...
Speaker: the music, the theme that played during high speed multiball, he composed that whole riff and played it on his guitar, but he played one note for Bill Perot and Bill Perot played the exact game that David Thiel had done in rock, which if I hadn't run into him and him being so proud to explain, you know, his cool technical trick, um,
Speaker: We would have waited until probably Pinbot, which finally had a Yamaha synthesizer, was the first game where we actually put a synthesizer in a game, hired our first musician to do sound.
Speaker: Eugene was an ad hoc musician.
Speaker: He played keyboard with Steve Ritchie, who played...
Speaker: the electric guitar, Mark Ritchie played the bass guitar, and they had a band that played in Steve's basement or in the vid kid's office until our landlord said that couldn't go any longer.
Speaker: So Bill sampled the notes, Steve composed the music.
Speaker: We laid it into the game and it was a cacophony because I had already done the entire game
Speaker: with sound calls and choreograph sound.
Speaker: Um, and we were near the end of the game.
Speaker: I mean, this wasn't like we, we had planned to do high speed with music in it.
Speaker: Um, and so we brainstormed over it and decided we would just put drums during the main play and, and Bill Pratt sampled a cymbal hit me, sampled a drum hit.
Speaker: And he, again, uh, you know,
Speaker: created some drum riffs and that was the background of the game so that all the sounds that were already done and sounded good could play over the drums and not clash with the music.
Speaker: And then during multival, we took all of the dumb sounds and just made them a little boop, boop.
Speaker: We just, we took them, dumbed them down so that the music could play in the sounds except for award sounds.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: wouldn't be clashing with the music.
Speaker: It was interesting.
Speaker: I'm watching Steve's Elton John today at expo, um, which you can't get to play.
Speaker: Cause there's a line of 10 people at each of the three games here, but I'm watching the game and they keep ducking the music to let you hear a sound or hear a voice cue.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so you've got these wonderful Elton John tunes playing and they keep ducking down to, so they're shelving the same problem in a different manner.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which it works.
Speaker: It works, but it's kind of like, you know, writing graffiti on a Picasso to me, hearing Elton John's music, keep getting ducked to, to let the game,
Speaker: do what it has to in communicating sound or instructions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we got the alphanumeric displays in high speed.
Speaker: We, at the end, get sound, which again is, is just works great.
Speaker: And I got to tell the alphanumeric story a little bit first.
Speaker: Yeah, go for it.
Speaker: I've told this many times and I'm sure it's out there, but,
Speaker: I envy what I am seeing at Expo right now because they are building these games with no expenses spared and then selling them with a real profit margin for buyers in their homes that want these as trophies, collectible trophies that they love.
Speaker: We were in a business where
Speaker: The games were bought by people that had to put them on a location and get quarters put in them and make a profit.
Speaker: And the price that we could charge was really limited to around $2,000.
Speaker: And we couldn't raise the price because we put something cool in a game.
Speaker: That's what the market would pay.
Speaker: And it went up at the very end into the 2000s.
Speaker: but probably during the time of high speed, it was like 1895 was what we sold a high speed for.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And putting in these alphanumeric displays, which Steve, you know, Steve, like we got to have these.
Speaker: And, and we got the company that made the displays that was cherry and displays Inc were the two display companies.
Speaker: We got them to make prototypes and they were going to add, you know,
Speaker: I don't know, maybe $50, maybe $75, $100.
Speaker: I don't remember what it was at the time, but they were going to add a significant cost that we really weren't in a good position to pass on.
Speaker: There were three or four pinball companies at the time.
Speaker: They were all high volume, very competitive.
Speaker: And if you raised your price, you pushed a lot of business to the other company.
Speaker: So Steve and I are lobbying for it and I've got them in the game in a prototype and I'm doing all kinds of different effects and showing how we would put the initials of the players.
Speaker: And I dreamed up a feature to make the displays worthwhile.
Speaker: I said, you know, we're going to put a jackpot in the game and we're going to show with the word jackpot, the jackpot growing.
Speaker: And we'd do it during multi-ball, and it would be progressive where it would build and build, and whoever hit the jackpot, which was going to be a really hard thing to do, would collect it all, and it would reset.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so we've mocked it up.
Speaker: We're showing this, and to management, it was insurmountable to add this much cost to the games.
Speaker: And there's a whole story of the designers can tell you
Speaker: about taking drop targets out and taking mechanisms out.
Speaker: And it just wasn't solvable.
Speaker: And the mechanism story is fun because drop targets are very expensive and our drop targets for a while were very unreliable.
Speaker: So they always got pulled out at the 11th hour, starting with firepower, where firepower was a drop target game.
Speaker: it played so much better with drop targets.
Speaker: And because of costs and because of mostly because of reliability, Mike Stroll broke Steve and Eugene's heart at the 11th hour, turning them into touch targets, into bullseyes.
Speaker: And later on, designers would all put drop targets in their prototypes and
Speaker: Okay, not because they ever planned to use them, but as a way when they were told their games were too expensive, okay, I'll take my drop targets out.
Speaker: And I think it's still happening to this day, but not to the point where you see these modern games are beautiful, they are built up, and they are shoveling money into them.
Speaker: for a market that wants it and will pay for it.
Speaker: And the side effect is it's created a real margin.
Speaker: Instead of making, you know, a few hundred dollars or three, $400 on a game, they're making thousands for each game with the markup.
Speaker: And that allows them to start and stop the lines and just make as many as people want whenever they want them.
Speaker: We had this whole problem
Speaker: that the line could never stop because we'd have to lay off everybody and we would lose ability and know how.
Speaker: So we are in the office that Stephen and I are working on with Ken Fidesna.
Speaker: We're showing the demo and he's like, that's all wonderful.
Speaker: We can't afford them for the games.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: it went back and forth and I, I got really angry and literally I was standing on one side of the high speed prototype and kind of was on the other side and I pushed the game over, which would have, you know, knocked him to the floor or, or whatever, but he caught it and stood it back up.
Speaker: It also might've set the game development back for two or three months if that thing fell in and went to splinters.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Like many things in life, we ended up with a compromise.
Speaker: We put the alphanumerics on the top two displays, left the cheaper numeric displays on the bottom two.
Speaker: And that's how peace was made.
Speaker: between the factions.
Speaker: It let us do a whole test and setting system where you could see what, you know, the settings in the game.
Speaker: You just have to go to a manual, you know, number three is number of balls.
Speaker: Number four is your tilt warnings.
Speaker: Number five, maximum credits.
Speaker: And so this brought in a whole new era there.
Speaker: But it let us communicate the features.
Speaker: It let us put in things like this jackpot feature in a discernible way.
Speaker: Um, and it really was, was a huge step.
Speaker: Um, high speed really is said to be the first game where you were playing through a story and, and getting, getting those displays in there really helped us tell the story and tell you what was going on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, so, so that's, uh, and the, the, the, um,
Speaker: Other big feature.
Speaker: Firepower started the feature was multiball.
Speaker: Starting in Scorpion and then Black Knight.
Speaker: It's let's make multiball an opportunity.
Speaker: Let's not just...
Speaker: put the balls out there and have you hit things.
Speaker: Let's have you make it an opportunity.
Speaker: In Black Knight, it was double and triple scoring.
Speaker: In Scorpion, it was however long you kept them in play, you got a bonus and could light extra ball and special.
Speaker: And then Black Knight, it was do a very difficult feat while all these balls are kind of messing you up and you'll be really rewarded.
Speaker: And that has been the foundation of game design since 1986.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The games that, you know, I just got done playing Godzilla.
Speaker: And I, you know, made lock shots for a multiball, which goes all the way back to firepower or to games like Fireball and Wiggler and 4 million BC back in the 70s.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Lock balls and then start multi-ball.
Speaker: And then shoot shots for jackpots while you've got the three balls in place.
Speaker: So that's kind of a thing that started with high speed and moved forward.
Speaker: And then the whole storytelling aspect.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Sorry, my mind's reeling because that is a ton of information.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I'm trying to think.
Speaker: I don't know the timeline super well between high speed.
Speaker: And then I know that Pat Lawler came in kind of the late eighties, but if I understand correctly, did you kind of bring him in and work after hours with him on bonsai run to kind of, I, I, I know that you had some, some way of bringing him in.
Speaker: I just don't know what the time is from high speed to then.
Speaker: Those are all relevant to the story.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: After high speed finished, I was a little burnt out.
Speaker: I was in there as a contractor.
Speaker: I never went back to work for Williams.
Speaker: I did space shuttle and high speed on contract.
Speaker: I was a little burnt out and sort of, you know, not doing a lot.
Speaker: Steve had me penciled in for his next game, which at the time was called F-111.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Paul DeSalt,
Speaker: was the software manager at Williams.
Speaker: He programmed games like Phoenix, like Blackout, like Alien Poker.
Speaker: And he was my first boss.
Speaker: Okay, he was running the software department.
Speaker: I worked for him.
Speaker: And he had left Williams after everything was dying in the early 80s.
Speaker: and was working in a company called NuvaTech.
Speaker: And NuvaTech was developing a bowling system, a new high-tech, you know, cutting-edge bowling system for Brunswick that actually operated the pin setters and, you know, had the computer displays and kept score.
Speaker: This was the first system that showed, you know, graphics and animations for when you did things that were successful.
Speaker: Pat Lawler was programming the pin setter.
Speaker: Pat had come from Dave Nutting where he had worked on some of the Bally video games, the Midway video games of the early 80s.
Speaker: Richard and Elaine Ditton, who later did Golden Tee Golf, created incredible technologies and have now gone on to be, you know,
Speaker: major force in the slot machine industry.
Speaker: They were working on the game programming of the system.
Speaker: Paul was managing the whole product and they needed help with the operating system in this platform.
Speaker: And he brought me in for a two-month project to come in and rewrite the operating system
Speaker: for this system.
Speaker: So I met Pat, Richard, and Elaine all working under Paul at Nuvitac.
Speaker: And Pat tells the stories how we used to go out to lunch every day and play high speed.
Speaker: And he had a thing for pinball and had designed a
Speaker: an early prototype for a game that was going to be called Wreck-N-Ball out in his barn out in Marengo, Illinois.
Speaker: Pat lives on a farm.
Speaker: He's not a farmer, but he and his wife, Patricia, live on five acres, I think it is, out in Marengo, Illinois.
Speaker: And he had come up with the idea for a vertical play field to go along with a horizontal.
Speaker: playfield and had designed the bottom playfield and put a couple of flippers on a top playfield and had a concept of how we would connect them.
Speaker: And he brought me out there and said, I want to show you something.
Speaker: And he showed it to me.
Speaker: And I thought it was interesting enough and a cool enough idea that I decided let's get together.
Speaker: Let's get a patent on this
Speaker: new revolutionary thing that's going to be the new pinball blockbuster.
Speaker: We know how that played out.
Speaker: And let's make the game and then see if we can sell it to Williams.
Speaker: So I am in awe at all of the home development resources and that in 2023, you can buy all the parts and buy an electronic system with a complete software package.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And make your own pinball machine.
Speaker: And lots of people, lots of people are doing it and it's incredible.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Back in, in that day, there were, there was nothing.
Speaker: And so not only did to do this, did we need to get the existing Williams electronics boards, which I knew a couple of things about to develop a program for.
Speaker: We bought a road Kings and,
Speaker: new in the box so we could get the, the hardware boards.
Speaker: And so we could get a whole harness.
Speaker: It wasn't for our game, but it was a whole harness with all the wire colors in it that we could use to try and wire up our prototype game.
Speaker: And then, um,
Speaker: I'm trying to think what happened in the development arena.
Speaker: I think I, I think I talked to Williams and they lent me a, uh, debugger board and I interfaced it to a PC and wrote the software to make the board, uh, integrate to what was a PC.
Speaker: Uh, Williams was using a VAC 750 at the time, um, to develop their games.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: So Pat and I, you know, Pat finished his job at Nuva Tech, finished his bowling pin setter, left Nuva Tech, and we worked for probably nine months, maybe 12 months on this in a studio apartment that I rented when Eugene and I closed VidKids.
Speaker: Eugene and I did...
Speaker: Robitron and blaster in an office on Halstead street in Chicago.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: When Eugene went back to college, I took the stuff that I wanted to still be able to use to do development work and didn't have room for it in my apartment.
Speaker: So I rented a, I had a two bedroom apartment on the 12th floor.
Speaker: I rented a studio apartment on the ninth floor and had a little workshop there.
Speaker: And so Pat and I built bonsai built wrecking ball, which was the prototype.
Speaker: in that apartment.
Speaker: And once we got it completed, we brought in the executives from Williams.
Speaker: Larry Thrasher had been brought in as president of the company at the time.
Speaker: He came from the automotive business.
Speaker: And Larry and Neil Nicastro and Ken Fidesna and Joe Dillon, and I think Eugene and Steve, all from Williams came out
Speaker: to take a look at Wrecking Ball.
Speaker: And they made a deal to license it from us, and we came in-house to do the game, which would be Bonsai Run, based on that game.
Speaker: And Ken would later tell me that he had no interest in buying that game and didn't really care whether Williams made that game or not.
Speaker: but that he bought the game to get me back inside the company.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: So that was a pretty cool thing to hear.
Speaker: We made Bonsai Run.
Speaker: I'm proud of the game.
Speaker: I love the game.
Speaker: It was commercially okay and far short of any expectations that anyone had for the game.
Speaker: And there was never a second one.
Speaker: And our patent, halfway through its life, we decided not to renew it.
Speaker: because there was going to be no economic value to it.
Speaker: But now I am back inside California Avenue.
Speaker: They invited Pat to do, they invited Pat to work at Williams after the game, and he signed a contract and went and worked on Whirlwind, I'm sorry, Earthshaker and then Whirlwind.
Speaker: And at the same time, I,
Speaker: took the task of rewriting a whole new operating system for the next generation.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so during the year and a half that Pat did those games, I did the new operating system and we got together to do Funhaus as the first game on the new platform.
Speaker: And by the way, I love your shirt.
Speaker: For those that aren't here with me, you've got a Funhaus.
Speaker: It is just a picture of Funhaus from collar to belly button.
Speaker: It is amazing.
Speaker: I want to point out, because this is one game that is kind of attributed as the first game with modes.
Speaker: It didn't really have like a wizard mode,
Speaker: you work with these, you go kind of through the tasks to get the frenzy.
Speaker: And was that always kind of the goal, was trying to start making modes, or was it just kind of like an aha moment as you're making Funhouse?
Speaker: It kind of falls back to a few games before where they started doing random feature awards.
Speaker: Earthshaker, I think, had one.
Speaker: I know Whirlwind.
Speaker: Whirlwind definitely had one with somebody that sounded like Pat Bertram.
Speaker: The guy from Green Acres said, well, looky here.
Speaker: And so we were sort of in a setup, which was actually backing up to space shuttle.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay, backing up the space shuttle.
Speaker: Space shuttle, we had, you spelled out S-H-U-T-T-L-E on the six stand-up targets and the drop target in the middle.
Speaker: And you won an award, which was a special and extra ball, lots of points, less, less, less, less points.
Speaker: And then that feature got changed by a very hard-to-make shot so that once it was set, you could work on it.
Speaker: And in space shuttle, if you got to the last ball and you, and you were having a really pathetic game, I would randomly like the extra ball for the feature.
Speaker: I think every ball, it picked a random, a random, it would go to, to, to, to.
Speaker: And it would go boom, boom, boom for extra ball.
Speaker: Our German distributor, Nova Operate run by a,
Speaker: guy that really was critical to the success of Williams.
Speaker: His name's Hans Rosenzweig and he died recently.
Speaker: But he, he would handicap our games.
Speaker: And when he loved the game, okay, he would write a big order.
Speaker: The line would start producing for Germany while they're testing here to get our, our,
Speaker: less aggressive distributors to take quantities of the games.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so the factory would run making these games and we had to, we had to six weeks from the end of production at whatever rate we're going, we had to either buy more parts.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Or decide production was over.
Speaker: And Hans, if he loved the game, he would always speculate on the games.
Speaker: Our local distributors were not as aggressive.
Speaker: They felt that, you know, if they ordered too many, they're going to get stuck with them.
Speaker: Then they're going to lose money closing them out.
Speaker: And closing out tends to lead to a downtrend as your customers now stop buying from you, forcing you to close out the next model.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it was a bad...
Speaker: a bad word in the business.
Speaker: Hans embraced that extra ball feature that after Space Shuttle, every game had to have it where it would give the lesser player more time.
Speaker: And it was a battle we fought in pinball because of the replay.
Speaker: Because of the replay that a good player
Speaker: could play forever and not pay.
Speaker: We were always trying to balance making the game enough there.
Speaker: Um, but not let the good player be able to run with it and, and replay boost eventually conquered the big player where the replay score would start going up.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But until we started using that mechanism, oh, by the way, alphanumeric displays can now let you change the replay score in the computer, not the operator.
Speaker: And Steve and I developed automatic replay percentaging on high speed, which the game would set the replay based on the overall quality of the players.
Speaker: But back to Hans and me.
Speaker: the extra ball, the pity, they were called pity extra balls.
Speaker: And it also, every game starting with Earthshaker or Whirlwind had to have a randomized feature that could deliver that.
Speaker: which became lovingly inside the company called stupid German feature.
Speaker: So such as what's your, you know, which whole, which shot is your stupid German feature?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But fun houses, stupid German feature was a mystery mirror.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: I don't think we ever lit the extra ball on it, by the way.
Speaker: I was, I was, um, every other one after it did.
Speaker: Um, I, I was, I was always trying, you know, holding the line of trying not to cheapen the games.
Speaker: And so, um, that brings us to grace period, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, I invented the grace period.
Speaker: on a shot where when the shot is lit and you shoot it while it's lit, if the light happens to go out, okay, you're still gonna get credit for that shot.
Speaker: And you know, when you turn the light out, you start a timer.
Speaker: Even though the light's not on, if the timer's still running, okay, you get credit for it.
Speaker: And the first free ball because you didn't do anything was flight insurance.
Speaker: No, actually flight insurance was the first bozo.
Speaker: We're going to, we're going to not let your ball in because you were bad.
Speaker: And F-14 only did it on the third ball.
Speaker: If you were having a bad game, kind of like the, the lighting, the extra ball on the third ball.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, you know,
Speaker: It worked okay on F-14, and somewhere some of the programmers started doing that on every ball of every game.
Speaker: If you had a bad ball, we're going to give it back to you.
Speaker: That didn't help the bad players very much, but it helped the good players when they had a bad ball, and they got to have three good balls per game instead of three balls however they went.
Speaker: And I was on the, the, this is ruining pinball side of it because I was always, you were trying to make a game for everybody.
Speaker: We're trying to walk the line where we put it right where it needs to be.
Speaker: And this really messed it up.
Speaker: And it caused a psychology of every, every,
Speaker: Everybody wanted to blame the game for everything.
Speaker: So anytime the game did something bad to you, it said, no, no, you can have the ball back.
Speaker: And the second revision of F-14, when Yagov would kick it right through the flippers, it would give you the ball back.
Speaker: The same thing that, you know, the game did something and you weren't, you know, maybe...
Speaker: Maybe you weren't up to it.
Speaker: And our games evolve from electromechanical games where you played a ball for 20 to 30 seconds to where, you know, you're playing balls for minutes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And we can only raise our price, which is where this story started by making them make more money in a location, taking quarters.
Speaker: And as the game time goes up, the amount in the cash box goes down.
Speaker: So I'm trying to walk the line and Adam's family had no ball saver.
Speaker: Um, I think they put one in Adam's family gold.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um, twilight zone had no ball saver and by world cup, which was the next game I worked on.
Speaker: You had to have a ball saver.
Speaker: I lost the war.
Speaker: Which is funny because like you look at Adam's family and twilight zone, like twilight.
Speaker: The first thing that comes to mind is like,
Speaker: you're not safe whatsoever on the first plunge.
Speaker: It, you either shoot it into the pops or it comes right to your flipper, whereas the world cup, it's coming right to your flipper regardless.
Speaker: On the plunge.
Speaker: So that's kind of funny.
Speaker: It should have almost been reversed, but yeah.
Speaker: Well, it was, it wasn't thought out in those terms.
Speaker: I, I, you know, part of the, let everybody do their thing at Williams for better or worse is
Speaker: there weren't strictly imposed standards.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: If I was running engineering in the early nineties, I probably would have made standards of what we needed to do.
Speaker: The better part is people do better stuff when they're not constrained and they can dream up other things.
Speaker: The bad part is
Speaker: We had a faction at Williams that, you know, wanted to protect the player from everything, which sadly I started.
Speaker: Space shuttle, you roll halfway up the ramp and come down, it pops the pose to keep the ball from going down the middle.
Speaker: So that started a terrible trend of game designers don't have to fix things that make their games play badly.
Speaker: We'll fix it in software.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And there are all, every game today is fixing every unfair thing and giving you balls back because, you know, we're kind and gentle in pinball.
Speaker: And in somebody's basement, we don't care how many minutes you sit on the machine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's totally changed.
Speaker: And it's really funny because I play some of these new games and I can't play them.
Speaker: I knew every game and I was good at every game and I learned every game and it dawned on me.
Speaker: These aren't three minute experience.
Speaker: These games are not designed to be three minute experiences that are good, medium or bad and extend to five, six, eight, 10 minutes when you rock it.
Speaker: And so there's been this, this incredible evolution over the years into the, you know, what we need to make people love them in their homes.
Speaker: Um, and, and all this kindler, gentler stuff is okay because replays, you know, if they're there or not, they're not costing anybody anything and time on devices and that thing.
Speaker: And these guys have figured out how to get margin, um, which didn't exist in my day and caused all kinds of things that we had to do that, that we, they don't have to do now and are a great reason
Speaker: that these games are so amazingly amazing and wonderful.
Speaker: So you touched on a game that is iconic in its own right.
Speaker: Adam's family.
Speaker: That was the first game.
Speaker: If I remember correctly, actually had modes that led to a wizard mode to tour the mansion.
Speaker: Where did that all come about?
Speaker: And would you ever expected it to made, you know, it's like 22, 23,000 units with gold.
Speaker: Like was,
Speaker: was the hype real there or was it just like we're, we're making this because that's what we've been told to do.
Speaker: It's, it's great to look at, to dissect that.
Speaker: Um, we were Williams.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And Williams kicked ass.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And drove Valley down to, to, to very low levels and drove, uh,
Speaker: That's a value.
Speaker: Joe Gottlieb down to very low levels and then resulted in Bali abandoning the business and, and letting our management by the pinball and video game units of Bali for less than the parts they had an inventory.
Speaker: So when Williams bought Bali, all they had to do is make enough games to liquidate the parts in the pinball machines.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And they had Bally for free.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Um, but Bally at the time we bought them was a second tier pinball company.
Speaker: We, we were, we were all over them.
Speaker: Um, you know, with our run in the early, um, nineties that we're talking about, you know, we, we, we, we kind of, uh, buried them and they came in and, and
Speaker: Um, we, some of the belly engineering team came in, Jim Patley came in with the purchase, which was awesome.
Speaker: Jim is a great designer.
Speaker: He brought a lot of know-how and later on they moved me up into management and Jim was my right hand man.
Speaker: He was out there doing it all.
Speaker: And I worked with him to run the division.
Speaker: Um, the belly crew that they bought in did some belly titles, moved all the hardware.
Speaker: And Neil decided it was time to rebuild the Bally brand.
Speaker: And so Pat, we've licensed Adams Family.
Speaker: Roger Sharp got the license for us.
Speaker: Pat, you're going to do the game, and you're going to do it under the Bally banner.
Speaker: And I'm telling you, this was a black, dark day in the life of the Adams Family design team.
Speaker: Because we really, I will tell you, we thought if we do the best game we've ever done, it'll probably sell 10,000 units.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because you just, we just can't get that much mileage with the game with the belly moniker on it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Pat created thing.
Speaker: which was, you know, great thing in the bookcase, which, you know, the bookcase came right out of the movie.
Speaker: Thing is so elemental to Adam's family that it had to be there.
Speaker: And we were working on the game with a set of rules.
Speaker: And like high speed, as we were working, we could not get the game
Speaker: to have the right balance and mix of everything.
Speaker: And high speed went through this, this stage where Steve and I were yelling at each other and not talking to each other.
Speaker: And, um, you know, we, we, we had some, uh, some, some executive therapists come work with us to, to keep things on track.
Speaker: And we eventually got there.
Speaker: Um, and Adam's family was the same way.
Speaker: And Adam's family was,
Speaker: had an early milestone of having a showable game ready for the premiere of the movie, which was in Los Angeles.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And we had gotten to the game to this point.
Speaker: We had gotten to the game to this point where we had a full game, full art, everything on it.
Speaker: And the rules and software were okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They were, you know, and they were fine to bring it to a movie premiere and show people for the first time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But we didn't, Thing was in the game way too much.
Speaker: And it just was a long, slow mechanism.
Speaker: And we just didn't have it.
Speaker: And Roger Sharp will tell you the story because Roger, you know, was the licensing guy who got the license and was a point person.
Speaker: And we went to LA.
Speaker: We were on the Rick Dees radio show from six to 10 in the morning.
Speaker: And Hammer was there.
Speaker: MC Hammer, the Addams Family theme.
Speaker: He was, you know, he was there and it was a great brush with greatness.
Speaker: And we showed the game there.
Speaker: And again, it was, you know, we weren't going to fulfill the 10,000 game plan.
Speaker: prophecy, and we just kept working at it.
Speaker: And again, there was a lot of friction.
Speaker: There was a lot of friction.
Speaker: There was a lot of friction between the designers and the programmers often, often, just because partially the designers grew out of being
Speaker: the producers, you know, video games have a producer.
Speaker: There's a programmer, there's an artist, there's whatever.
Speaker: The designers were the, created the design and the ideas and were the producer.
Speaker: They, they had the view and were in control of everything that happened.
Speaker: And the programmers, you know, pre Eugene, actually pre Randy Pfeiffer, Randy Pfeiffer did the first Williams system and did flash.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And he was a guy, you know, that, that was going to do more indifferent because the realm of what was being done wasn't known when Randy did flash or when Eugene did firepower or when I did high speed.
Speaker: Um, and so there was friction between Pat and I at that time.
Speaker: And, and Pat and I,
Speaker: had less friction than other design teams.
Speaker: And we did four consecutive, for me, it was four consecutive games with Pat.
Speaker: Um, although he did two between Bonsai Run and Funhouse.
Speaker: Um, but we were, we were just struggling and we just kept on moving the pieces and moving the pieces and finally, you know, created a great game.
Speaker: Um, but it was, um,
Speaker: we were saddled with Bally.
Speaker: We had a game that just wasn't cutting it maybe a month before it had to be finished.
Speaker: And the rest is history after we worked it out.
Speaker: And again, once we started putting it out and it was making $400 a week in 1980, 92.
Speaker: And it
Speaker: and eighth week, ninth week, 10th week, 11th week, it's making $400 a week at a particular arcade.
Speaker: Um, boy, we knew we were onto something, you know, this was, this was the players weren't letting it go at the level that they would, they were contending to be on the machine.
Speaker: And, um, you know,
Speaker: It got near the record and our friend Hans Rosenzweig in Germany went and bought enough games to get from whatever they had sold to be just one over the record of eight ball, which was 20, 20, 230.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so the original run was 20, 231.
Speaker: And then there were a thousand gold games made.
Speaker: like a lot of games that both runs could have run longer, but we had the six week rule.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the gold was one of the first times a six week rule was ever broken where they restarted a game to make a thousand games, made it a premium, you know, you know, was the glimpse of what they're all doing now where we'll make a nicer game.
Speaker: And it was really just superficially nicer.
Speaker: And we'll charge more money and we'll put numbered plates on it and make a big deal out of it.
Speaker: So that was that.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: And then you guys then went into Twilight Zone, which was a great follow-up to Adam's family.
Speaker: I guess, how did that one come about?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: What did I say at the top of this?
Speaker: Designers are insecure?
Speaker: Hat?
Speaker: He felt he needed some new innovation and that innovation for Twilight Zone.
Speaker: Initially, before the other things like the gumball machine and the Powerball, that innovation was we're going to make the games bigger.
Speaker: You know, it's not going to be that wide body size.
Speaker: It's going to be a size in between, which was, I think, with Big Game and Cheetah, the Stern game.
Speaker: No, Big Game was big.
Speaker: It was Cheetah that went to the Twilight Zone size.
Speaker: Big Game was Big Game.
Speaker: And so, you know, he did that.
Speaker: And all of a sudden, we're back in the margin.
Speaker: You know, if you make a game with...
Speaker: two more square feet, you're going to shovel two more square feet of stuff on the game.
Speaker: Um, and so we went to work on that project.
Speaker: Um, it's a game.
Speaker: It's the most frustrating pinball machine I ever worked on.
Speaker: Not because it was difficult.
Speaker: Um, although it was, and there are modes where you can trick the game into thinking there's a power ball there when it's not, uh,
Speaker: Um, but because we could not get the left side drain, had the bumpers in the drain on the left side.
Speaker: We could not get that to work right.
Speaker: It was either too liberal.
Speaker: We closed it off.
Speaker: We closed it off.
Speaker: I think when we initially did it in the good players, you know,
Speaker: we're destroying it top to bottom and we opened it up and tried to adjust it and Pat tried to put rubber here and there and everywhere.
Speaker: And when it was open up, it was a really mean, vicious game.
Speaker: And for great pinball, it's finding that balance.
Speaker: Twilight Zone to make money in an arcade or a bar was not a great pinball.
Speaker: But to the collecting community,
Speaker: It shows when you take a shovel and start shoveling components and features and things into a game that, boy, are they going to want to have that game.
Speaker: And it's a, you know, it's a glimpse at where we are now.
Speaker: But I, you know, I, I had one of every one of my games when I downsized
Speaker: I got rid of some of them.
Speaker: And then when I moved to an apartment, I got rid of almost all the rest of them.
Speaker: And I did not hug Twilight Zone out the door.
Speaker: It is so revered in this community.
Speaker: And it's a game that I just, you know, I just am so frustrated.
Speaker: We could never get it right.
Speaker: You know, it was...
Speaker: It wasn't what it was supposed to be.
Speaker: It was supposed to be better than Addams Family.
Speaker: And it was... Again, we couldn't get it where it made a lot of money, and that was our job.
Speaker: Not to make collectors go, we love your game.
Speaker: Our job was to make games that make lots of money and sell lots of games.
Speaker: Which is funny, because some people revere Twilight Zone way above Addams, and it just...
Speaker: Between that and it's, it sold 15,000 units.
Speaker: It was very, very respectable.
Speaker: And again, the last couple of thousand were overshoot because of the height, which were maybe not closed out, but, but squeezed out slowly and painfully because the market didn't want to, um,
Speaker: And I'm approached by collectors who talk about Twilight Zone and want me to sign a flyer or their lower arch or their back class.
Speaker: And I don't say to a single one of them that, you know, I'm glad you love it.
Speaker: I'm happy to support you and it.
Speaker: But I just cringe every time I think about that game.
Speaker: So after Twilight, you kind of stopped.
Speaker: So at least on Pinside, it said that you did World Cup soccer and you did Jackpot.
Speaker: And that was kind of the last couple of games you did for Williams Valley.
Speaker: And then what did your role transition to while you were there?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: World Cup was a game being developed by John Papaduke.
Speaker: I think Jack Scalin did the mechanicals on it.
Speaker: Matt Coriel was the programmer.
Speaker: I think Kevin O'Connor did the art.
Speaker: Um, that was a team that I was not a part of.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um, and they had a working white wood and John's John Papa Duke's father got deathly ill.
Speaker: And John left the project in the company to tend to his father.
Speaker: Um, and, um,
Speaker: So Matt asked if I would come in and help him with the software and if I could help work the rules of the game.
Speaker: And I sort of came in.
Speaker: Jim Patla, again, was there, so he was probably the game design lead on it.
Speaker: Um, as far as making, doing all the things that game designer has to do to work with the mechanical guys, get the parts made, get it through the system, publish the drawings.
Speaker: Um, and I kind of came in as, uh, as lead programmer working with Matt and co-designer, um, where John had a, had a, had a, had a great layout.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I didn't change a thing in the layout except that the ramp that came around from the lock mechanism had a plastic ramp that went behind the flippers and came back and dumped the ball by the right flipper.
Speaker: I think it comes out on the left flipper.
Speaker: Is it kind of like Blackwater 500?
Speaker: And the ramp was positioned.
Speaker: So that when you try to reach in to lift up the, the lower arch to lift up the play field, you got this plastic ramp and had to worry about breaking it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so the only change that Jim and I made to the play field was just cutting the ramp and delivering it to the left flipper.
Speaker: And then.
Speaker: We took some of the rules that he had in there, and Matt and I really created mostly a new set of rules.
Speaker: I think we kept the multiball rules, which would lock the balls up in the ramp on the left side.
Speaker: And then it would light final draw to start multiball, and then it would start multiball.
Speaker: And I don't remember if they had an objective or not.
Speaker: It's shoot ramp.
Speaker: then shoot goal, shoot ramp and shoot goal.
Speaker: That's the, those are the rules.
Speaker: Oh, that's what you did.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'm not sure what John had there.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um, but we, we ended and, and, and, and we made everything being about all the, get hitting the ball and the goal and getting excited.
Speaker: World cup is the game.
Speaker: If when anyone says I want to put a pinball in my basement,
Speaker: I tell them, find an old World Cup.
Speaker: That's the game I would recommend.
Speaker: And I had two or three of them, and they are still in my friend's basements because that is such an instant gratification game.
Speaker: You're flipping the balls without skill, and they're going up the middle mostly.
Speaker: And it's scoring goals, and the crowd's cheering, and the announcer's announcing.
Speaker: Tim Kittsrow did an amazing job on vocals on that.
Speaker: and we worked with Tim on those vocals and he, he was amazing.
Speaker: And I'm really, really sad.
Speaker: I ran into him at an event somewhere recently and introduced myself, you know, Larry DeMaria, I work with around the world.
Speaker: He doesn't even remember working on that game.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: He does not remember working on that game.
Speaker: You know, uh, of course, um,
Speaker: You know, he's legendary for the Midway sports games, but he does not remember.
Speaker: And he did.
Speaker: He killed it.
Speaker: Yeah, he killed it.
Speaker: And then again, Matt and I had to do magic to to make it sound like an announcer, not sound like Max Headroom.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is kind of what happens when you start just firing off speech calls.
Speaker: But it was it was a great, great team effort.
Speaker: And, yeah, Kevin did the back glass.
Speaker: It's beautiful.
Speaker: We made Striker, their mascot, into a star, which FIFO didn't do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: was it FIFA?
Speaker: FIFA didn't make striker into a star they created him they gave us all of the material ahead of the World Cup as far as a style guide we used him he was lovable, huggable and it's really funny that he was not a brand he was not relevant nobody would associate looking at that image with World Cup soccer but but
Speaker: The exact antithesis of Twilight Zone.
Speaker: It didn't have the commercial success of some of the biggest games, but I love how that game came out.
Speaker: And again, I can't take anything away from John.
Speaker: It's his masterpiece, but I got to paint a few brush strokes in there as we went through it.
Speaker: And it's a great game.
Speaker: I still own that game.
Speaker: When you talk about friends having that still in their basement...
Speaker: My wife's like, you're never getting rid of that game.
Speaker: I think it does everything for not only the beginner, but it also does it for the expert.
Speaker: It's a deep, challenging game.
Speaker: And it's got the perfect wizard mode.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: Going up against Germany and finally dumping all the balls on and just attacking and attacking.
Speaker: There's no other wizard mode like it, and it's amazing.
Speaker: Now, if anybody knows and has the home ROMs, which certainly you can find, they're out there.
Speaker: If you push and hold the buy-in button, anytime during the game, you push and hold the buy-in button, it will go into the wizard mode.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: I didn't know that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You have to have the home ROMs.
Speaker: Do you have the home ROMs?
Speaker: I don't think I do.
Speaker: I'm going to have to find them.
Speaker: I might know a guy.
Speaker: But with the home rems installed, you can push and hold the buying button.
Speaker: Same thing for Twilight Zone's Lost in the Zone.
Speaker: Same thing for Adam's Family Tour of the Mansion.
Speaker: I didn't know any of this.
Speaker: This is the first time I've ever heard this.
Speaker: I've been doing this for a decade.
Speaker: Okay, well, I made home rems for all these games, and it wasn't for wide distribution, and we didn't.
Speaker: you know, early on, there was no, no free information exchange over the internet.
Speaker: Although there was our GP on, on Usenet.
Speaker: It was a Usenet group that, that had a lot of us interacting and ended up recruiting people into our companies.
Speaker: Um, Duncan Brown came to us definitely, you know, through the Usenet group.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: Kevin Martin.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Kevin Martin.
Speaker: When Kevin was on RGP, he was an RGP busybody.
Speaker: He literally responded to every post anybody made and lowered the quality of that group by three runs.
Speaker: He ended up working at Data East as a result of a Data East pinball and confessed that his behavior was solely to get the job in the business.
Speaker: So we exchanged stuff like that, but I'm sure the home runs for all those games are out there.
Speaker: And they should each have a start the wizard mode by holding in the button.
Speaker: And they all clear your scores at the end of the wizard modes so that, you know, it doesn't get you anywhere for high score purposes.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That's a tidbit for your listeners.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: So what ended up happening, because you were still at Williams until they closed the doors, correct?
Speaker: Ish?
Speaker: Let's say that.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: Let's say that.
Speaker: I actually left Labor Day and they closed on October 25th.
Speaker: So you were there pretty much up to the end.
Speaker: We're talking days, a couple of months.
Speaker: So what did your role become after Jackpot?
Speaker: Were you kind of just overseeing people or?
Speaker: Actually, before Jackpot, I was put as director of engineering.
Speaker: So I had everybody doing work on pinball, mechanical, sound, electrical, game design, software, the quality control, the manuals, technical writing was all one group under me.
Speaker: And Jim Patlow was at my side running that group.
Speaker: The game jackpot came to be because we hit a point where there was going to be a perceived hole in production.
Speaker: It's a recurring theme.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: No Fear was delayed and No Fear was going to miss its targeted date.
Speaker: And three or four months, Jim was waving red flags that we have to do something to fill the hole in production.
Speaker: And so I suggested, well, there's two things.
Speaker: One is we had a hole in production.
Speaker: Two, we were losing our audience.
Speaker: Okay, the games had and were evolving and were so involved that the beginner players were totally not staying or playing.
Speaker: And so we needed a new game.
Speaker: My concept was let's take an old, let's take the only thing we can make in time, kind of like Super Defender.
Speaker: The only thing we can make in three or four months is a game that's done.
Speaker: So let's re skin a game.
Speaker: And I picked pin bot, which would become jackpot with the notion is it's got this bank of five targets in the middle and a flailing player is going to just hit them.
Speaker: And as long as I make good stuff happen up the middle, maybe I can, can get newer people to hang onto the game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, uh, the jackpot rules were so much kinder and gentler.
Speaker: Any five shots on either bank would give you the five entire columns to open the visor, let you shoot up the middle to start multiball.
Speaker: And then we built a game around it, around gambling.
Speaker: And it was a real interesting segue because I started using gambling probability math concepts to
Speaker: in the features that were gambling features and in casino run, which was the wizard mode of the game.
Speaker: Well, it was one of the wizard modes of the game.
Speaker: Again, casino run was, was four features completed to get casino run.
Speaker: So it was not tour the mansion or lost in the zone or final match.
Speaker: Real regular people with a good game could get the casino run.
Speaker: And then there was mega visor, which was the real wizard feature.
Speaker: in jackpot.
Speaker: And I was, um, I would work all day in my management role.
Speaker: And then at six o'clock, everyone went home and I worked from six till 12, one, two, whatever programming jackpot.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, you know, we did the game.
Speaker: I, I, it's a game I like, I'm happy with, um, didn't sell a lot of games.
Speaker: And, uh, you know, we were, we were,
Speaker: Clearly in that period, clearly in that period of declining sales where, you know, world cup, I think was probably seven or 8,000 jackpot was, you know, three or 4,000.
Speaker: No fear was about the same.
Speaker: And, and, uh, it, it went down from there.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: I don't know if it achieved the objective of getting weaker players to want to play pinball.
Speaker: Um, but it was a game that was really liked by the really good players.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, for the, for the difficult side of the game, especially those super Jack bots too.
Speaker: And some of the quirkiness a little bit to the rules of locking certain balls, a certain wing and getting double jet super Jack bots.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And again, uh,
Speaker: I'm a player.
Speaker: So I'm, you know, a lot of the things we come up with are you do something cool and don't get rewarded.
Speaker: You go, let's, let's reward that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, um, and so features like that come about that way.
Speaker: Um, so what made you decide, I, you know, there was, I know when Williams closed, it kind of was like resetting the clock.
Speaker: They kind of said, Hey, if you want to work in slots, you're gonna have to start back at square one with us.
Speaker: I know Stern was kind of taking their pick of the crop.
Speaker: What made you decide to just not keep going with pinball?
Speaker: It really turned out to be what happened when they closed pinball.
Speaker: From 1996 to 98,
Speaker: I was working over slots and pinball and I was learning how to make cool slot machines with some of the old pinball guys who, you know, we, we laid off people, we downsize.
Speaker: So some of the people that were doing pinballs in my department, we moved over and they were working, making new kinds of slots.
Speaker: Um, and in night show, show, I, I,
Speaker: I had a background in slots in 99 when they fired everybody from pinball.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They fired all these guys that were brilliantly talented people like Scott Slomiani, Duncan Brown, Al Thomas, Ben Gomez.
Speaker: Um, and I couldn't ever,
Speaker: hire them to work for me because of non-solicitation agreements that I had as a manager of the company.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So under no circumstances could I try and go do what Eugene and I did with the people that were working for me.
Speaker: And so Al, of course, Al Thomas, I could do another podcast twice as long talking about Al Thomas.
Speaker: He's brilliant.
Speaker: He's crazy.
Speaker: He's a great guy, and he was all over me.
Speaker: You know, we got to start a company.
Speaker: Because Al was working.
Speaker: Al was still in gaming, as was Ben.
Speaker: But, you know, he saw that he had worked with Scott and Duncan on gaming projects.
Speaker: and felt, you know, they could all do it.
Speaker: Come on, let's all start a company.
Speaker: And so, you know, I, I looked around there really, um, pinball Williams pinball was done.
Speaker: I believe Stern was not going to last real long in the way Williams had, had, had met its demise.
Speaker: And so I, I didn't think there was a future in pinball and Gary Stern pinball was on life support for a lot of years before anybody could conclude, you know, this is solid and this is a business.
Speaker: And I always, my vision is the best thing that happened to Gary Stern was Jersey Jack.
Speaker: Cause Jack decided we're going to shovel all the stuff in the machine and charge a high price.
Speaker: while Gary was still in the no profit margin mode.
Speaker: And once Stern changed the Jersey Jack model, everyone in pinball starts making money now.
Speaker: So I did not expect Stern to survive.
Speaker: Williams had asked me to go interview with the gaming department and, um,
Speaker: I ended up following the Al Thomas route and LED gaming was started with myself, Scott and Duncan.
Speaker: And Al and Ben decided not to join the group after all, once we got it started.
Speaker: And each of them came to join the company once we were on our way in making games.
Speaker: So we had the five of us at one point, as Al had envisioned.
Speaker: And then one by one, Ben and Al went back to the mothership working for WMS Gaming.
Speaker: And we went in a different way.
Speaker: So obviously things have changed.
Speaker: It's been 20 plus years since you've been in the industry and whatnot.
Speaker: Do you, seeing everything, I mean, like you said, we started this out by you were playing Godzilla, Keith's masterpiece, and seeing where pinball has come from.
Speaker: Do you, is there a part of you that wants to get back in it?
Speaker: Do you feel like you've said everything that needs to be said for pinball?
Speaker: I just, I feel like you're a very great asset to the industry.
Speaker: And I know a lot of people say, I don't know if you'll say it about yourself, but I'll say it for you.
Speaker: Would you ever take another opportunity to work on a pinball project?
Speaker: That's a question for another time.
Speaker: I started another company during COVID called AdsWorks.
Speaker: And we are supplying content to the online slot machine industry.
Speaker: It's legal in six States in the U S and we set up a company to deliver games like my studio with Scott and Duncan were making into those States for online gaming.
Speaker: And it has become, um, a significant, uh, uh, endeavor.
Speaker: We are doing great, but it is taking up so much time that, um,
Speaker: that there's no time to think about pinball.
Speaker: And when you're developing a game, to do it well, it's almost all immersive.
Speaker: When I went into management at Williams, there was a vision that I was gonna help people and add special sauce to the games.
Speaker: And I sprinkled a little bit of dust here and there, but I never was able to have that effect to really improve games with what I could think of or develop because I wasn't immersed into it.
Speaker: I had 100 people working for me and eight projects at a time going on.
Speaker: And there really wasn't the...
Speaker: the just ruminating and thinking and going over and over and over.
Speaker: And, you know, for me, half of the best ideas and features came when I woke up from a dream or were in the shower.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And that only happens when you're immersed in something.
Speaker: So there's no chance now.
Speaker: And probably as the,
Speaker: my company gets on its feet to not need me as much as it does.
Speaker: I don't, I think the same problem comes to getting involved in pinball.
Speaker: I don't have the hours to, to put into it that will, that will result in really cool stuff.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I think trying to,
Speaker: to say, go, go to a pinball company once or twice a week and, and, you know, um, do it.
Speaker: And the other thing that I learned that I've been learning the hard way, because I, I, I'm a good pinball player.
Speaker: And most of the games that are being made today, I can't play very well.
Speaker: Well, we were designing games for a three minute experience and, and,
Speaker: You know, in three minutes, not much happens in these games.
Speaker: There's too many building blocks everywhere to do 25 things.
Speaker: That even my mind locked into the games isn't there right now.
Speaker: And so I enjoy watching them.
Speaker: I enjoy seeing them.
Speaker: Um, I'm hoping maybe one day I'll get to have the time to enjoy playing them again.
Speaker: I have fun with the nineties games.
Speaker: Um, I have, I have fun playing some of these games some of the time, but, uh, but it's, uh, it's been a stretch.
Speaker: Well, and before we started talking, you said you've downsized your collection.
Speaker: What's, what's the one game you've got in your collection?
Speaker: Um, my collection, well, I've got,
Speaker: A couple dozen at friends' houses.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: One game in my apartment is Adams Family Gold No.
Speaker: 2.
Speaker: And then I have a MAME cabinet.
Speaker: And our grandkids play the MAME cabinet more than the Adams family.
Speaker: But it is great to see at Expo all the new young people playing pinball because that wasn't happening five, six years ago.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: They just did the Stern Pro Circuit on Tuesday night.
Speaker: And it was Escher versus Jared and Escher's 20 and Jared's 19.
Speaker: And it's like, where are these kids coming from?
Speaker: But it's, it's awesome to see this passion and this love and they're playing at such a high level too.
Speaker: We saw Josh, Josh and Zach Sharp playing when they, when they weren't good and could barely see over the, the, uh, class.
Speaker: And it was the first IFPA tournament, which, um,
Speaker: I think Funhouse was around 1990, maybe 91, where all of a sudden Josh could play pinball.
Speaker: He didn't win anything or place or anything in that tournament, but I saw him have a comeback ball of 10 minutes on a game that it's like, okay, here's somebody you've got to watch.
Speaker: And these kids are amazing.
Speaker: They are.
Speaker: Escher, I mean, what the hell?
Speaker: What the hell?
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: I think you've summed it up perfectly for a lot of us, whether you're competing or not against him.
Speaker: That's perfectly put.
Speaker: Absolutely incredible.
Speaker: Well, I want to thank you, Larry.
Speaker: I know this has been at least a year in the making.
Speaker: having you come on.
Speaker: I really appreciate you taking time.
Speaker: I know your schedule is super busy, but I really do thank you for coming on.
Speaker: Got any last thoughts before I shut off the recording?
Speaker: No, thank you, Josh.
Speaker: This was a lot more fun than I expected it to be.
Speaker: So thanks for staying on me to do it.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Well, like I said, thank you so much.
Speaker: Holy crap.
Speaker: That was almost two hours long.
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: Every second of it.
Speaker: I know the sounds a little raw.
Speaker: I do apologize.
Speaker: Like I said, I was recording this off my phone via Zencaster and some corner at Expo as people were moving around.
Speaker: So you're going to hear, you heard some coughing or heard some people talk in the background.
Speaker: I like his natural ambiance.
Speaker: I guess it is what it is.
Speaker: I'm just fooling myself.
Speaker: But overall, I love the interview.
Speaker: There are some names in here I wanted to point out.
Speaker: Steve Kordek.
Speaker: He was instrumental in the 60s and 70s.
Speaker: Some of his games are the most beloved that are out there.
Speaker: Stars and Nineball.
Speaker: Steve Epstein.
Speaker: God rest his soul.
Speaker: He just passed away this last couple of years.
Speaker: And he was very pivotal in all this as well.
Speaker: also with bringing pinball to New York for the Broadway arcade.
Speaker: He was a close friend of Roger Sharpe's.
Speaker: I assume you know who Roger Sharpe is.
Speaker: We talked about Roger Keith Elwin.
Speaker: It's amazing how a lot of these people tie together
Speaker: And you can kind of see the evolution of pinball.
Speaker: And it was kind of cool to hear him talk about the old guard moving into the new guard because now they're kind of the old guard and we have the new guard.
Speaker: That's Keith Elwin, Eric Biniere, Scott Denisi, all these wonderful people.
Speaker: And the future of pinball, listening, you know, talking about Escher Leskov.
Speaker: I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I had.
Speaker: It was definitely worth the two and a half year wait.
Speaker: For those that want our regular show, we will be back.
Speaker: We are aiming for this Thursday to record.
Speaker: And Scott will be back with me.
Speaker: We're going to talk everything Pinball Expo.
Speaker: I know you're wanting to hear about everything that happened there, but I'm going to hold off until then.
Speaker: I want to thank you.
Speaker: If you want to get a hold of us, at LoserkidPinball, for our socials, for Facebook, Instagram, for TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, all those.
Speaker: Twitter, X, whatever.
Speaker: If you would like to email us, we are loserkidpinballpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: I want to thank those that came up and talked to me on Expo and just said how much that our content means to them.
Speaker: Sometimes it kind of gets flung out into the internet.
Speaker: I see the numbers, but sometimes we don't get feedback.
Speaker: And honestly, lately we've been receiving a lot of feedback and I want to thank you guys for that.
Speaker: And gals, we have an amazing amount of women that listen to the show and I want to thank them personally because
Speaker: You women are helping progress pinball and evolve it.
Speaker: And it's amazing.
Speaker: It truly is.
Speaker: I love to see that pinball is such a diverse group of people that have come together for such a wonderful little niche thing.
Speaker: Like I said, thanks again for tuning in.
